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**Carlisia Thompson:** Well, I use one and I'm very happy with it. I use it all the time; I can't live without it, actually. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It's a tiling window manager? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Which one do you use? Moom? |
**Carlisia Thompson:** No. I'm actually looking for it, because I just... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I wanna say it starts with an A, or something... There's one I've heard of that I've heard people use; I haven't tried it yet. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I've tried all of them, and none of them are i3. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Well, it's definitely not i3, and I also have not used i3, but it is called Divvy. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Oh yeah, Divvy. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I haven't even heard of that one yet. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I've been using it forever. If I get a new machine, it's the first thing I put in. I do it without even thinking that I'm doing things; I just move things around. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So i3 of course is written in C, but it's amazing... It really is. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Thank you very much. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So is your history mostly in C and C++ and things like that? |
**Michael Stapelberg:** \[04:05\] Sort of. So I looked into C, of course, as the most natural systems programming language when you're using Linux or any other UNIX operating system. I have done a little bit of C++, but I don't like it as much, largely because it seems like too large of a language and I feel like I can... |
I have done a fair bit of Perl; in fact, the i3 test suite is entirely implemented in Perl, which seemed like a good choice at the time and it's still an okay choice today, I would say. Sometimes contributors are a little bit put off, but now they also have to deal with Perl code, right? But I'd like to say there our P... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. You'd basically have to halt new development while you ported your test suite, and that's not valuable at all, and I can't see anybody really wanting to volunteer for that. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Yeah. I've done a couple of test suite-related refactorings in the last couple of weeks, and it's enough work as is without even changing any bit of the language. |
**Erik St. Martin:** So you've done quite a bit in C and things like that... I'm trying to remember when this article came out, but it was probably a couple months ago you did a [blog post](https://michael.stapelberg.de/posts/2017-08-19-golang_favorite/) on why Go is now your new favorite language, and kind of having a... |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Right, sure. I'll try to remember all parts of the question, because I fear that the answer will be a little bit long-winded. I mean, after all, I've written a blog post about the subject, right? So I initially looked into Go in 2009, coincidentally the same year that i3 was started, right? But ... |
But then I sort of put it away for the next three years, until in 2012 the Go 1 came out. That was sort of when I sort of seriously started to look into it. At that point I had, mind you, four years of experience writing a moderately complicated project in C. It's not that I hadn't done any C development before that, b... |
\[08:03\] Where it's really at is the integration at the tooling and the consistency and the language ecosystem and also the community. That is all where Go really shines. The language is simple, the ideas - some of them are not quite standard, I have to say, but if you look in history, you will see that none of them i... |
**Erik St. Martin:** That's I guess a point I didn't even catch in the article. You read the article, but it doesn't really shine through that that's the only thing. You don't actually mention a single feature. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Right, and I only realized this after I had actually completed the article. It's not like I set out to write an article that only goes on about how great the tooling is. It actually mentions more than just the tooling, so my point is not just "The tooling is great." That's certainly one of the i... |
So I don't need to read through a lot of the codebase in order to jump in and understand the little bit that I'm currently interested in. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, I think Go is THE most readable language I've ever used, and I've touched most of them... But I always love the readability of Go. It's very clear that they spent a lot of time thinking about how to read code, versus how to write code. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Yeah, absolutely. And one point that sort of ties into both of these themes is go fmt, of course, which autoformats your code. Just a couple of days ago I actually had a discussion with a friend of mine, where we were now getting together because we have this retro gaming event coming up next mo... |
Then inevitably I got into that discussion with a friend of mine who was like, "Yeah, so I think this is sort of a good idea, but in this particular file I don't like what the formatter does", and I'm like "Oh, this again..." Because once you start using Go, you kind of just put away this entire discussion. Nobody woul... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** \[12:10\] That is such an interesting comment, because if you think about it, nobody ever turns it off. There are no rebels that would do that. I think it's fixed to how much it makes sense to have it. |
**Erik St. Martin:** If they did, they'd get caught in code review. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Yeah, absolutely. I think the only time I've ever seen code not autoformatted in the recent times is whenever people are working on a single project, like individually, without code review, and they just forget, because they haven't had their editor setup fixed yet. So the vast majority of their... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, that's true. Or they're moving machines and they don't have their editors set up on their new machine to do it, something like that. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Exactly. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, but it's still good to have people not do it for whatever reason in code review... People code reviewing and not caring enough, but it makes so much sense there; even when we're reviewing code, we care that "Hey, this should be formatted. It must be formatted the correct way, the standard w... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think it's interesting though, because coming into it, like, people have preferences; they are zealots about it. A number of tabs, or spaces and things like that, and when you first come in, or whether the curly brace goes on what line, and things like that, and people are so stuck in that in the... |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Yeah, absolutely. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I've never been that way... Has anybody here been like hard for tabs or spaces, or... |
**Michael Stapelberg:** I have to think of the Silicon Valley episode recently, where that was an entire thing, right? |
**Erik St. Martin:** Oh yeah, where he broke up with his girlfriend? |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Yeah. \[laughter\] |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, the perfect girl. \[laughs\] It wasn't just a girlfriend, she was perfect! |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I've been in two or three day long meetings before... This was C\# back in the early 2000s, where we spent two or three days talking about what our code formatting style was, and I find that to be the largest waste of time ever. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, that's true. I've worked for several companies that had style guides for every language that was used, and you would get caught in code review for style guide. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I think that's why we've adopted _gofmt_ as canon, because everybody's been there; we've all seen this ridiculous waste of time on formatting, and I don't even care if it matches my preference. It makes no difference anymore. I got used to it in a week, and now _gofmt_ is my preference, and there's ... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Can we make _gofmt_ work on other languages? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Well, it's funny that newer languages are starting to adopt this. Rust has a format program, Pony has a format program... I really appreciate the fact that others have seen this and they're taking it to heart. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** As long as you don't have the option to customize it. It's either on or off, but if it's on, it's one thing. |
**Michael Stapelberg:** Yeah, and I think that is actually the critical insight that _gofmt_ brought to the table... Because the idea itself is certainly not new. There used to be the indent tool, which we tried to adopt for the i3 codebase back in the days, and it didn't quite work, but we also made this wrong assumpt... |
\[16:07\] But I didn't realize that at the time, and then of course you try to figure out exactly the correct indent parameters... And then clang-format came to the table, but it also supports multiple styles, so which one do you choose? It even allows you to derive from a common style, but then define exceptions to th... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** Yeah, you're basically just automating your opinions, but you still go through the process of which opinion is going to prevail. |
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